Opinion: There's Nowt So Queer As Labels

There was a meme circulating around Facebook not long ago featuring an inquisitive velociraptor asking why ‘gay marriage’ was a thing when people don’t talk about ‘straight marriage’. The answer, of course, is that labelling others incurs power, while going unmarked implies inconspicuous normality and social acceptability. Similar thinking could be applied to the use of ‘gay’/non-use of ‘straight’ in cinema. How come films espousing heterosexuality are just films, while those about same-sex love are relentlessly classified accordingly?

The question popped up again recently when this year’s Palme d’Or – the Cannes film festival's highest accolade – was awarded to Blue Is the Warmest Colour. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, maker of excellent realist-melodrama The Secret of the Grain, it’s a tale of two females falling in lust, love, and then out of both. Sounds intriguing. I can’t help but feel annoyance at the film’s ‘lesbian’ tag, though.

The term has been plastered all over Blue Is the Warmest Colour’s write-ups. Meanwhile, nobody mentions the straightness of fellow Cannes competitors the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davies or Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, despite it wafting off both of their trailers. And the power games don’t stop there. According to filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, who sat on the festival jury, “...people saw beyond that it was a lesbian love affair. It was a love affair that everyone can identify with.” This is a common hetero tic: a piece of art is branded homosexual and simultaneously praised for reaching some dreamland of conveniently nonspecific universality.

Reactions to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011) illustrated this perfectly. Lauded for speaking to everyone, its story and images in fact revolve around what it’s like to be gay: physical awkwardness; dealing with heterosexism; fear of showing affection in public. Yet, somehow the praise showered on Weekend missed these details, alongside an opportunity to actually learn something about sexual identities. Critically, perhaps, paying attention to what is really gay or lesbian in a film – and if Blue Is the Warmest Colour is worth its accolade, it will contain such particularities – would mean also considering what it is that makes a film heterosexual.